Category Archives: Nineteenth century

“Read with much fun in 1911, LMY”. Whether this was meant as a sincere expression – or not – of her appreciation of the “indifferent verse” written by Maria Eleanor Vere Cust, her husband’s cousin-once-removed, Louisa Yorke clearly left one of her trademark comments after reading the volume. “Indifferent verse” is how Maria Cust’s biographer describes the poetry presented in Lucem sequor and other poems (1906), and to judge from an earlier privately printed publication, Songs of sunshine and shadow (1903), the comment is fairly apt. Both works at Erddig are inscribed to Maria’s father, the orientalist Robert Needham Cust, for whom she worked as a secretary. Although the name “Cust” appears infrequently in the Erddig book collections outside the Library, it highlights the continuing connections between the two families. Continue reading →

The survival of children’s books is sometimes one of the great strengths of country house libraries. How many of us still have the books we read as kids? How many books survive the rather unpractised handling skills of young children (my favourite book certainly didn’t make it unscathed…) or the pens, pencils, paint, food, bath water to which these books might be subjected?

Chances are that if a historic children’s book hasn’t become part of a museum or library collection, the odds are much against it. In the past, I’ve catalogued small numbers of nineteenth-century children’s books at Calke Abbey and I was really pleased to find some at Erddig. Continue reading →

Quick post this week again – sorry! I’ve just started at Erddig, a few miles across the Welsh border near Wrexham, for a six-week book cataloguing project. I hope to continue blogging about items in the Hatfield collection, but also to post a few images from this National Trust property in due course. Continue reading →

Previously, I mentioned some of the highlights of the stores collection at Calke. It is clear even at this relatively early stage (about 800 books have now been added to the Trust’s collections database and will be added in due course to COPAC), that the stores not only contain books from the final generations of Harpur Crewes, but also a substantial library from the family of Col. Godfrey Mosley (1863-1945), who married the last baronet’s eldest daughter, Hilda Harpur Crewe (1877-1949). Continue reading →

This is a book on ice-skating, or rather the art of figure-skating, first published in 1890 (the image is of this edition). Although it has a very dapper looking chap on the front cover, it also contains chapters on skating for ladies (in which is described “the beauty of hand-in-hand skating”, p. [v]) and a chapter on speed skating by a “well-known Fen skater”. Mr Adams himself was a member of the National Skating Association and the Wimbledon Skating Club. The book appeared at a time of some controversy in the figure skating world. International competitions favoured a particular style of skating, which was not the “English style” advocated by Adams in this book (incidentally, he maintained that the best skating outfit for men was the tweed suit). Apparently, Adams competed in a European figure skating competition in 1905 and was placed last…

This is not a great image, because it was taken with the camera on my phone, but you can still see the discolouration of the spine and the stains on the cover. The bleached spine is probably sun damage, but I like to think that the stains are a sign that Godfrey Mosley, who signed the book in 1891, used it to learn how to skate! The book is now at Calke Abbey, in Derbyshire. Mosley married Hilda, the eldest daughter of Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe, 10th and last baronet, and a large number of Mosley’s books and those of his family are now in the bookstores at Calke.